Not looking forward to returning to school tomorrow. Lessons to plan, facts to cram into their heads before the exams in a few weeks, and, joyfully, GTP stuff to complete. And just as I was trying to summon up the energy to try to become vaguely enthusiastic about the next five weeks, before another blessed holiday, I read this article:
I mean, really?
Admittedly, I am in my first year of teaching and have thus not had the inconvenience of preparing for a school inspection, but are the unions being genuine in claiming that 'many teachers were...even attempting suicide because of the workload'? This 'workload' is, according to Christine Blower, upwards of fifty hours a week, and extra-stressful when the normal day-to-day requirements of planning, teaching, and marking are compounded by the need to prepare for inspections and fulfill other governmental targets.
This is, to be frank, rubbish.
Ever since I started teaching, and before, all I hear or read about the job and workload of teachers is how stressful it is, how much work it is, how difficult it is. By all accounts, teachers are the hardest-pressed professionals in the UK, if not the world. But, from my own experience, this largely appears to be a myth, well-propagated by the teaching unions in particular, which then filters down into the mouths of teachers themselves.
Yes, some aspects of the job are stressful - I am filled with admiration and sympathy (although a complete lack of empathy) for those who teach in schools where they are routinely sworn at and threatened, where the pupils rarely come to school, or where the classroom ceilings are falling in. Those teachers have a right to complain and to demand better working and teaching conditions, primarily so that they can actually do some educating, rather than crowd-control. Indeed, the teaching unions should be using their time and subscription fees to take this more roundly to the government, and try to do something about it. But this is largely not the experience of teachers in the UK, even those who teach in a comprehensive in a 'disadvantaged' area. Most teachers have pupils who chat continuously and can't be bothered to do their homework, and a big pile of marking at the end of the day. Is this, whilst being bloody irritating, really a sound reason for 'becoming hooked on drink and drugs or developing eating disorders after being over-worked'?
I read such statements, and I feel teachers sound like a lot of moaning minnies.
Is it any wonder the tide of public opinion increasingly criticises teachers, for being unqualified or ineffective? For not being good teachers? For sending children out into the world who can barely read and write and have absolutely no idea how to behave in public?
I am six months into the job and had no experience of teaching in schools when I started (bar a short stint as a classroom assistant at Sunday School, which mainly consisted of giving out pencils). I have a full teaching load, with a variety of ages and abilities, and the responsibility to produce my own lesson plans, schemes of work, and teaching resources. I am also completing the Graduate Teacher Programme alongside my work, which requires seemingly endless reflective logs, wider reading, assignments, training days, meetings, and so on. And yet, I can say with certainty, I currently have the most free time I have had for years - since well before university. There are frustrations, as I expect there are with any job or activity one is involved in. But to say it is a seriously stressful profession, I think not.
Time for teachers to man up?
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